
' 




Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPosrr. 




YOSEMITE FALLS 
Height, 2,600 feet 



Out-of-Doors 



N. Ellsworth Olsen, Ph. D. 




With an Introduction by 
Jacob Riis 



Or 

The 

Open-Air 
Spirit in 
Relation to 
Modern 
Life 



Pacific Press 

Publishing 

Association 

Mountain View 
California 



; ^\ 



Copyright 1910 by 
Pacific Press Publishing Association 



<gGI.A2658( - 



rO THE HONORABLE 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
EX-PRESIDENT OF THE 
UNITED STA TES 



Introduction 



wr T"^00 much house" is the key-note of this 
t book. The note is sound. Civilization 
has been making of the world a hothouse. 
Man's instinct of self-preservation rebels ; hence 
the appeal for the return to the simple life that 
is growing loud ; hence such books as this that 
tell plainly what we have been trying to hide 
and excuse with long pleas for the educational 
value of play, namely, that the boy is a young 
animal, that needs to grow a sound body, or all 
the philosophical fripperies and furbelows we 
are trying to fit on him will breed down the 
race, not up. Of course play is educational ; it 
is the business of the boy, and a big part of the 
business of the man, which we have been 
forgetting. 

Let's out where the winds blow. When your 
mind gets muddled and sluggish, go dig in the 
garden and plant something. Everything that 
grows in my garden has been planted over 
many times to brace me up. If the clogging up 
has gone past that, I get me out in the field 
and the woods with a gun. Kicking through 
the dry leaves along the hedgerows on a bright 
frosty morning is a prime cure for that. If it 
rains, all the better. The man who has never 



Introduction 



"^ ■ ^OO much house" is the key-note of this 
I book. The note is sound. Civilization 
has been making of the world a hothouse. 
Man's instinct of self-preservation rebels ; hence 
the appeal for the return to the simple life that 
is growing loud ; hence such books as this that 
tell plainly what we have been trying to hide 
and excuse with long pleas for the educational 
value of play, namely, that the boy is a young 
animal, that needs to grow a sound body, or all 
the philosophical fripperies and furbelows we 
are trying to fit on him will breed down the 
race, not up. Of course play is educational; it 
is the business of the boy, and a big part of the 
business of the man, which we have been 
forgetting. 

Let's out where the winds blow. When your 
mind gets muddled and sluggish, go dig in the 
garden and plant something. Everything that 
grows in my garden has been planted over 
many times to brace me up. If the clogging up 
has gone past that, I get me out in the field 
and the woods with a gun. Kicking through 
the dry leaves along the hedgerows on a bright 
frosty morning is a prime cure for that. If it 
rains, all the better. The man who has never 



Page Four INTRODUCTION 

been alone in the woods in a rain-storm, or 
when the snow fell softly and silently, draping 
all the world in white, has missed something 
that makes for seeing things straight. He can't 
afford it. 

Too much house. Let's have less of it, more 
of the wilderness, if that can be; of the open, 
anyhow. A friend of mine, an old soldier, has 
a hobby that is worth trying. He wants to see 
boys drilled in the long vacation by thousands, 
like an army, out in some forest: country where 
there is elbow-room, the boys who are now shut 
in the city's stony streets through the long sum- 
mer heat. He insists that it can be done as 
easily as an army of men can be maneuvered, 
and with no more chance of mishap. It is just 
a question of organization. Let us have it tried. 
It would make for the nation's defense in more 
ways than one, all good. For one thing it would 
pry open a door leading out of the city's slums 
which all the past has conspired to shut, a door 
that has got to be opened in our time, lest 
worse mischief befall. 

To every voice that is raised to help the 
world out-of-doors it is indebted for a lift 
toward the day of better sense, of common sense. 

JACOB A. RIIS. 



Contents 

INTRODUCTION 3 

CHAPTER ONE— A Sedentary Race . . 7 

CHAPTER TWO— The Problem of the Children . 17 

CHAPTER THREE— The Young Man's Needs . 26 

CHAPTER FOUR— Beauty Culture Out-of-Doors . 35 

CHAPTER FIVE— More Fresh Air and Less Furniture 40 

CHAPTER SIX— "Too Much House" . . .46 

CHAPTER SEVEN— The Higher Ministry of Field 

and Wood 53 

CHAPTER EIGHT— Around the Camp-Fire . . 68 

CHAPTER NINE- n The Long Brown Path" . 82 

CHAPTER TEN— Back to Nature and the Soil . 90 



CHAPTER ONE 



A Sedentary Race 




UT~ OF- DOORS, 
under the blue 
dome of heaven, 
where the sun 
shines and the 
fresh breezes 
blow, where the 
grass springs up 
under foot, and 
the silent £tars look down by night — here 
amid life's great "primal sanities," with 
energy, gladsomeness, and health teeming 
on every side, man had his ancient home. 
Here he toiled, and here also he enjoyed 
the fruits of his labors, his wants being 
few and easily satisfied, his pleasures 
natural and wholesome. 

How different is the pent-up life of our 
great cities to-day, with its multiplication 
of artificial wants, its increasing indoor 



Page Eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

attractions, its machine methods, and, we 
may be permitted to add, as a natural 
consequence, its growing lack of robust 
manhood and womanhood. 

To be sure the outdoor spirit has not 
entirely left us. We are by in£tin<5t and 
tradition fond of outdoor pursuits. The 
blood of the brave pioneers who cleared 
away huge forests, and laid out farms and 
built cities where was a trackless wilder- 
ness, flows in the veins of thousands of 
our foremost citizens. We also have on 
our farms to-day a fine type of men and 
women; and in the smaller cities and 
villages there is a fair opportunity for 
open-air recreation and wholesome contact 
with the soil. 

But this notwithstanding, when the 
nation is viewed as a whole, it must be 
admitted that outdoor activities do not 
occupy so large a place in the life of the 
people as they once did. There is a large 
and rapidly growing class of young men 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Nine 

and young women whose daily life alter- 
nates between close, confining work in 
shop or factory, and indoor amusements 
of a more or less debilitating kind. These 
people work indoors, sleep indoors, and 
for the most part take their recreations 
indoors; and they are paying the penalty 
in loss of physical stamina. 

Modern life tends to create a sedentary 
race. A highly wrought and artificial 
civilization has led far away from the 
rugged yet more wholesome conditions of 
earlier times. Huge smoke-producing fac- 
tories have taken the place of farm and 
village workshop; while troops of ugly 
tenement houses, stealthily advancing, row 
upon row, are occupying the green fields 
and smiling valleys that surround our 
large cities. 

In the course of a rapid industrial devel- 
opment, there has been a great demand 
for fadtory hands, shop assistants, account- 
ants, and other indoor workers. Farming 



Page Ten OUT-OF-DOORS 

has been crowded to the rear as a compar- 
atively unremunerative employment; and 
the ambitious young men have crowded 
into the large commercial and manufac- 
turing centers. As a consequence, the pro- 
portion of our country's population gaining 
a living on the land is steadily decreasing, 
while the cities grow by leaps and bounds ; 
and year by year a larger number of 
persons are cut off from wholesome con- 
tact with nature, and forced to spend their 
lives in an artificial and health-destroying 
environment. 

Under such conditions physical and 
mental development mu£t be one-sided. 
The man who works in a large fadtory, 
running a piece of machinery which turns 
out one thing day after day, tends to 
become, in spite of himself, a machine- 
server — a kind of human attachment to 
the machine which does certain things it 
can not do itself. * And one who sits at a 

*One of the engineering journals records an incident 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Eleven 

desk or stands behind a counter in some 
large commercial house all the day, and 
spends his nights in a small, ill-ventilated 
bedroom, is hardly in a better situation, 
judged from the view-point of what is 
natural and wholesome. 

Not only are the labor conditions unfor- 
tunate in themselves, but they also influ- 
ence the recreation hours. Young people 
in such an artificial environment are likely 
to lose their natural, God-given in^tindts, 
and fail to employ such spare time as they 
have in making good by active outdoor 
exercise of some kind the enforced confine- 
ment of their work hours. Too often the 
need of wholesome recreation is made to 
yield to a morbid love of excitement; and 

which illustrates the over- specialization quite generally 
prevalent. The manager of a large machine-shop, having 
occasion to engage a new foreman for a certain department, 
went outside to find his man, the reason being that among 
the 120 men in that department, not one had the all-round 
practical knowledge necessary to undertake the work. 
Said an employee in the same shop, " I've drilled just so 
many holes in just that one part for four years, and I've 
never yet seen the machine that part goes into." 



Page Twelve OUT-OF-DOORS 

the bodily energies, already severely taxed 
by the work of the day, are further depleted 
by the dissipations of the night. The the- 
aters, music-halls, and other popular resorts 
of our large cities, attradt thousands of 
youths who have spent the whole day 
indoors, and would profit far more by a 
brisk walk in the open air or an hour's 
practise in a gymnasium. It is to be feared 
that the va£t majority of our young men 
engage in athletics by proxy only; they 
watch a game of football when they ought 
to be playing one, and the only exercise 
they get is in cheering themselves hoarse 
for the vidtors. 

The sedentary tendencies of the age are 
without doubt a chief cause of the physical 
deterioration which is so much discussed 
in these days. Diseases multiply among 
us because men's bodies are too feeble to 
resist them. They have no vitality, no 
strength of constitution, no downright 
physical vigor. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Thirteen 

1 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
More life and fuller that we want." 

And to get more life we muS go where it 
is dispensed, out under the open heavens. 
Pills and drafts avail nothing, because 
they do not get at the root of the matter. 
Life muS be lived on a higher plane, the 
constitutional vitality mu£t be increased, 
if a condition of radiant health is to be 
maintained. 

House plants are subjecft to a number 
of disease conditions from which plants 
growing in the open are exempt. So also 
an indoor, sedentary life brings on an 
unnaturally delicate state of the body, thus 
making it an easy prey of the omnipresent 
microbe. And even if definite diseases 
are not contracted, there is a general 
feeling of malaise, a disinclination for 
work, a sense of physical unfitness, all of 
which follow naturally from sedentary 
living. The body heeds an abundant 
supply of oxygen to enable it to do its 

2 — Out-of-Doors 



Page Fourteen OUT-OF-DOORS 

work, clear away all wastes, and keep in 
proper running order; and the natural way 
to take in oxygen is while engaging in 
brisk exercise in the open air. 

There is a dark side to our much-boasted 
civilization. To the extent that it has de- 
veloped the brain at the expense of the 
body, it has been a curse, not a blessing. 
Even on its philanthropic side, it has erred 
fundamentally. There has been plenty of 
attempted cure, but very little wise preven- 
tion. "We are proud of our hospitals," 
as Lady Henry Somerset once put it, n but 
we have forgotten to be ashamed of our 
diseases. n We are so often arriving on the 
scene too late to give the help moSt needed. 
The honest working man who is Struggling 
to keep independent and do his share of 
the world's work, is given comparatively 
little encouragement. He often lives in a 
moSt unwholesome and depressing en- 
vironment. But let him once become 
industrially useless or a criminal, and he 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Fifteen 

will be well housed and well fed at gov- 
ernment expense. 

Innocent babes grow up in the slums 
under conditions which we would not 
think of tolerating in our workhouses or 
prisons. Is it at all remarkable that these 
babies do not long remain healthy ? Their 
lives are often wrecked physically within 
the fir^t year, and then their mothers carry 
them back and forth to the hospitals where 
the professional attention of our foremost 
medical experts is freely granted them. 
Are we not by such methods continually 
putting a premium on disease and pauper- 
ism? The healthy child is allowed to 
grow up in squalor and filth ; the diseased 
child is taken into the hospital, and re- 
ceives every attention. The homes of the 
working classes, both in town and in 
country, are overcrowded and unsanitary. 
Our insane asylums are palatial affairs. 
No wonder they keep well filled. Our 
unfortunate labor conditions, coupled with 



Page Sixteen OUT-OF-DOORS 

wrong habits of living, make for insanity 
and for all-round race degeneration. 

We ought to do something in a national 
way for health; surely it is not enough 
merely to make provision for disease. 
There is a larger field for our hard-working 
medical men than they now occupy. We 
can ill afford to let their knowledge and 
skill be spent almost entirely in efforts to 
bring into a tolerable State of repair bodies 
broken down through wrong habits, bad 
working conditions, and disease-producing 
home environment. Why should their 
services not be brought into play in wise 
teaching of hygienic laws, and in creating 
wholesome labor conditions and a health- 
making environment, as well as in healing 
the sick? 



CHAPTER TWO 



The Problem of the Children 




HEN there is the 
problem of the 
children. A great 
deal is said of the 
kind of education 
they ought to re- 
ceive. But educa- 
tors are concerned 
chiefly with the 
mental and the moral side of the child. 
They seem to forget that little boys and 
girls have bodies as well as minds, and 
that a really satisfactory educational sys- 
tem should take this fad: fully into ac- 
count. In the writer's opinion, the child 
of five needs a playground more than 
he needs books. This would seem to 
be especially true of the pale-faced little 
boys and girls now growing up in our 
large cities. If half the time spent by 



Page Eighteen OUT-OF-DOORS 

these children in brain work were given 
to physical development, the acftual mental 
progress would be greater. It is to be 
feared that our present system keeps the 
children tired and jaded pretty much the 
whole year. They are martyrs to exami- 
nations, high marks, and exhibitions. 

The value of book knowledge is so 
greatly overestimated in these days that 
we incline to wish, with Thoreau, that a 
society might be organized for the diffu- 
sion of useful ignorance. Certainly we 
could take a Strong, healthy country boy 
at the age of ten, who could neither read 
nor write, and give him in four or five 
years an education which would be for 
all practical purposes far more useful than 
that which our children now acquire at 
such a great coSt of bodily vigor in twice 
the time. 

It is only fair to admit that the children 
of the slums often find their school hours, 
even though, as we think, they are devoted 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Nineteen 

too exclusively to mental tasks, more en- 
joyable than the hours spent in homes so 
darkened by poverty and drink as to be 
such only in name. 

But if the home conditions of the poor 
are so unfavorable, is not this an additional 
reason why we should endeavor to make 
provision for adequate training, physical 
and mental, in our public schools? 

And the physical defectives are by no 
means found among the poorer classes 
only. Medical examination of the school 
children of Chicago reveals the startling 
facft that one child out of three is afflicited 
with some nervous disorder; while two 
thirds of New York's school children have 
some physical disability. Is it not, in view 
of these things, only too evident that there 
is something radically wrong in our treat- 
ment of the children? Has not our view 
of education been very narrow and one- 
sided? Have we not been fighting against 
instead of cooperating with nature ? 



Page Twenty OUT-OF-DOORS 

Is it too much to ask that the objedt 
always to be kept in view in any truly 
national system of education should be 
the harmonious growth and development 
of the child, not the attainment merely of 
an arbitrary standard of proficiency in book 
knowledge ? Ought not the teacher's work 
to be judged by the health and all-round 
efficiency of his pupils, rather than by the 
marks they attain? Should not the exam- 
inations, if such are necessary, be real 
examinations, giving some fair idea of the 
physical as well as the mental growth of 
the child, and of his general "fitness"? 
Ought not the playground to be something 
more than an overcrowded prison yard? 
And should not all the children, large and 
small, have an opportunity to take part in 
wholesome outdoor recreation? Ought not 
education, in short, to be a reasonably sat- 
isfactory training for real life? 

The Playgrounds Association of America 
is doing a moS excellent work in agitating 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Twenty-one 

for the provision, in all our large cities, of 
a sufficient number of open squares fitted 
out with swings and divers fixtures for 
games and recreations, to allow all the 
children, rich and poor alike, to indulge 
their instind: for play. The movement, 
though in its infancy, is having a rapid 
growth, and is winning general recognition 
among reflecting people as one of the moSt 
important and far-reaching of the various 
agencies which aim to combat the down- 
ward tendencies of city life. 

It was a saying of Phillips Brooks that 
he who helped a child helped humanity 
with a distinctness, with an immediateness, 
which no other help in any other Stage 
could possibly match. The divine inStindt 
planted in the heart of every little boy and 
girl calls for a playground ; and there is no 
Stronger condemnation of our twentieth 
century civilization than the spedtacle of 
little pale-faced urchins trying to make 
a playground of the dirty and dangerous 



Page Twenty-two OUT-OF-DOORS 

streets and noisome alleys in which they 
are doomed to spend what should be the 
happiest portion of their lives. 

Surely Heaven's choicest blessings will 
re£t upon the men and women who are 
trying to remedy this great evil, and restore 
to the child of the slums his natural herit- 
age of sunshine, and fresh air, and space 
in which to run and play safe from horses' 
hoofs. It is encouraging to see many of 
the be£t people aroused to present-day 
needs, and impressed with the solidarity 
of the nation's social interests. The idea 
that we have done our whole duty by the 
people of the slums when we have pro- 
vided them with chapels and Sabbath- 
schools, is fortunately giving way to a 
broader conception of the meaning and 
scope of true Christianity. We are coming 
to understand that there is a practical side 
to religion ; that it has to do with this life 
as well as with the life to come ; and that 
there are times when a cup of cold water 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Twenty-three 

will speak more eloquently for the Saviour 
than a dozen sermons. We are coming to 
respedt the in^tindt an all-wise Creator 
has put into the child's heart in order 
to preserve the race. Perhaps some of us 
can even sympathize with the poor little 
tenement invalid who protected, ,! I don't 
want to get dead and be an angel, — I want 
to play fir£t. n 

The city playground provides a pleasant 
meeting place for the care-worn mothers. 
Here they can gather after the hard work 
of the day, and pass a pleasant social hour 
while their boys and girls are playing 
healthful games. We ought to spend our 
leisure, as far as possible, in the open. 
Many a nervous woman owes her break- 
down largely to being for so many hours 
daily confined within walls. Out-of-doors 
there is sunshine for the soul as well as 
for the body ; and the pure air has healing 
power. What pleasanter sight could we 
have, in warm summer evenings, than 



Page Twenty- four OUT-OF-DOORS 

groups of parents engaged in genial con- 
versation while the little ones pursue their 
games? And in many of the playgrounds 
the parents themselves join in the games 
and amusements, and smooth out their 
wrinkles, becoming young again by asso- 
ciation with their children. 

The playground is also valuable as a 
means of lessening crime. It is the unani- 
mous testimony of the police that where 
playgrounds are established, the arrests for 
juvenile crime are lessened. Speaking of 
this matter in a recent Mansion House 
meeting, the Lord Chief Justice of England 
made the significant declaration, n I say 
without hesitation, after now nearly forty 
years' work at the bar, and a few years 
upon the bench, that . . . second to drink 
and second only to drink, the real cause 
of crime is the difficulty of finding healthy 
recreation and innocent amusement for the 
young among the working classes." 

Fortunately the dodtrine of total deprav- 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Twenty-five 

ity as applied to childhood is no longer 
believed; and we are coming to see that 
even the street urchin responds so warmly 
and so loyally to the efforts made to meet 
his needs, that harsh measures are seldom 
necessary. In fadt by far the larger part of 
the city boy's waywardness is the outward 
expression of pent-up physical energy. 
Give him room to move about and exercise 
his lungs. Give him, too, grass and trees 
and flowers, and they will exert a quieting, 
refining influence on his turbulent spirits. 
There is a world of truth in Mr. Riis's 
declaration, " I have seen a handful of dai- 
sies keep the peace of a whole block better 
than half a dozen policemen's clubs." 



CHAPTER THREE 



The Young Man's Needs 




EEDLESS to say 
we should not 

NY) re£t with giving 
l/j playgrounds to 
boys and girls. 
Opportunities for 
healthy, open-air 
sports should be 
granted to the 
youth and young men. The country 
needs a hardier and more virile type of 
manhood. The vitally depleted cigarette- 
poisoned weaklings rapidly growing up in 
our great commercial centers can not main- 
tain a high physical standard for the race. 
Physical stagnation is the bane of these 
young men. They are muscle-bound, 
short-winded, and susceptible to colds and 
catarrh. They are not to blame that their 
work is of a sedentary nature, though some 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Twenty-seven 

of them might have chosen better even 
here; but surely there is no excuse for 
their leisure hours being generally spent 
indoors. There should be a strong senti- 
ment in favor of our youth and young 
men cultivating such open-air pastimes as 
tend to health and all-round development. 

Unfortunately the opportunity to take 
adtive part in such fine sports as baseball, 
golf, and tennis does not come to every 
young man. We could wish that there 
were better facilities for young people of 
both sexes to engage in suitable recreation 
in the open air. If some of the public 
money spent in caring for the "unfit" were 
used in creating a proper environment for 
the young people now growing up, it would 
be wise economy in the end. 

We admire the superb examples of the 
human form that the sculptors of ancient 
Greece have handed down to us, but we 
are likely to forget that a national system 
of physical culture would effedt as much 



Page Twenty-eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

for America of to-day as for Greece of the 
fifth century B.C. Body training was uni- 
versal in those days ; it was a young man's 
fir^l duty to develop himself physically. 
Games were not confined to the few ; there 
were no professionals, and no enormous 
crowds of non-playing onlookers. Opportu- 
nities for physical training and competition 
in the games were open to every citizen, 
no matter how poor he might be ; and the 
force of public opinion was doubtless suffi- 
cient to overcome any aversion to outdoor 
activity which might be felt by an excep- 
tional person here and there. It is true 
that among the more favored classes in 
our own country there is a healthy love 
of the open air, as well as good opportunity 
for indulging in outdoor sports; but what 
we lack is some system national in its 
scope. At present it is the exceptional 
man who has an environment favoring 
good development. The great majority, 
at lea^t, of the dwellers in our large cities, 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Twenty-nine 

are entirely cut off from these health-giving 
opportunities; and the result can not but 
tend toward national physical deterioration. 
We have what is pracftically a national 
system of free libraries. Why should we 
not have free recreation grounds? 

While there is urgent need of better 
facilities for getting out-of-doors, there is 
also need of a more general use of the 
facilities already offered. If the young men 
should save up the money now spent in 
mild dissipation or at lea^l in questionable 
forms of amusement, they would soon have 
a sum sufficient to enable them to join 
some society or club which offers the 
desired privileges.* 

Judged by its effects on the physique of 
the race, our twentieth century civilization 
can hardly be called a success. Modern 

*The recreation grounds and gymnasiums conducted by 
some of the more favored branches of the Y. M. C. A. afford 
admirable opportunities for wholesome outdoor pastimes, 
and it is encouraging to see that this side of the activity of 
a most valuable organization is receiving increased attention 
in recent years. 



Page Thirty OUT-OF-DOORS 

life, it has been well remarked, needs a 
touch of wholesome savagery. The tend- 
ency is to softness rather than to hardiness 
and virility. The fine-clothes occupations 
are overcrowded. Too many young men 
are afraid to soil their hands, and would 
rather be "respectable" than healthy. 
Physical exertion is distasteful to them, 
because they have loSt the outdoor feeling. 
Civilization has them in her Straight-jacket. 
Their lives are running in deep ruts, and 
are becoming daily more joyless and mon- 
otonous. These young men need outdoor 
training, wholesome exposure to the ele- 
ments, and an opportunity to "rough it" a 
little. The invigorating breezes of moun- 
tain and moor are required to cure the ills 
of civilization. Mother Nature's help muSt 
be invoked if we are to bring up healthy 
sons and daughters. Whitman Struck the 
nail on the head when he said : — 

"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons; 
It is to grow in the open air, and eat and sleep with the earth." 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Thirty-one 

Far be it from the writer to deny the 
benefits of civilization, which in their way 
are very great ; but civilization is at be£t a 
sort of "finishing off" process; it can not 
create strong men and women. It dresses 
them, as Thoreau has told us; "it makes 
shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of 
the feet." It is not always conducive to 
the cultivation of the sterner virtues. It 
can not impart moral stamina, fearlessness, 
n go. n Outdoor life alone does not do this, 
but it offers a good environment for the 
development of all that is be£t and strongest 
in a man. 

We can not afford to overlook the moral 
side of physical development. Weak, flabby 
muscles very often go hand in hand with a 
general flabbiness of character. Sedentary 
occupation, unless relieved by periods of 
open-air activity, tends to emasculate men, 
to render them limp, feeble, invertebrate, 
in the presence of the 3tern realities of a 
business or professional life. Conversely, 



Page Thirty- two OUT-OF-DOORS 

outdoor habits help to give firmness of 
texture to mind as well as muscles, and 
3tay and stamina to the character. The 
young man who has determined, in Goe- 
the's words, — 

" Im ganzen, guten, wahren, 
Resolut zu leben,"* 

mufl spend some time regulary out-of- 
doors, where he can take long, deep breaths 
of life-giving oxygen, and harden his mus- 
cles with use. The sickly sentimentalism 
which destroys so many youths does not 
flourish in the open, wind-swept fields, but 
in ill-ventilated living rooms, in crowded 
music-halls and variety houses, and in the 
unwholesome atmosphere of cheap novels. 
How it clears the mind of sickly fancies, 
doubt, and discouragement to walk out in 
a 3tiff March wind ! How much easier the 
perplexing problems of business and of 
every-day life can be solved when, after 

*In the whole, the good, and the true. 
Resolutely to live. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Thirty-three 

vigorous exercise, the blood tingles in every 
organ of the body, and the whole man is 
alive to his finger-tips ! 

Verily Spencer was not far from right 
when he said that "a good animal" forms 
the foundation for success in any walk of 
life. The man of outdoor inStindts is on 
vantage ground in the struggle for exist- 
ence. He usually has a Strong grasp of 
essential truths, and can often by simple 
intuition arrive at results that others toil 
in vain to achieve. Such a one usually 
carries with him a breezy optimism which 
is inStindt with life and feeling, and won- 
derfully attractive in a world of anxious, 
care-ridden toilers. 

The outdoor man, too, has Staying 
powers. He has not dissipated his ener- 
gies in frivolous pleasures, but drawing 
freely from nature's Storehouse, the great 
out-of-doors, has laid up a generous supply 
of nervous energy and physical endurance 
which can be relied upon in times of 



Page Thirty-four OUT-OF-DOORS 

emergency. Therefore he is not so easily 
flurried, and he does not worry. Physical 
bankruptcy comes not to such a man, for 
he works with a good reserve on hand. 
He is the "man of cheerful yesterdays and 
calm to-morrows. 



CHAPTE R FOUR 



Beauty Culture Out-of-Doors 




EAUTY as well as 
health is the off- 
spring of outdoor 
life, — a fac5t which 
the young woman 
should not forget. 
The formative in- 
fluences of nature, 
though too subtle 
to allow of close analysis, are none the less 
powerful. Wordsworth has given fitting 
expression to a great truth in those incom- 
parable lines describing the rearing of a 
natural girl: — 

"The floating clouds their slate shall lend 
To her; for her the willow bend; 
Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm 
Grace that shall mold the maiden's form 
By silent sympathy." 



Page Thirty-six OUT-OF-DOORS 

"The stars of midnight shall be dear 
To her; and she shall lean her ear 
In many a secret place 

Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
And beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face. 

B And vital feelings of delight 
Shall rear her form to stately height, 
Her virgin bosom swell." 

Richard Jefferies has tritely remarked 
that "it takes a hundred and fifty years to 
make a beauty — a hundred and fifty years 
out-of-doors. 11 "Open air," he continues, 
"hard manual labor or continuous exercise, 
good food, good clothing, some degree of 
comfort, — all of these, but mo£t especially 
open air, mu£t play their part for five gener- 
ations before a beautiful woman can appear. 
These conditions can only be found in 
the country, and consequently all beautiful 
women come from the country. Though 
the accident of birth may cause their regis- 
ter to be signed in town, they are always 
of country extraction." 

Adtive outdoor habits are necessary to 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Thirty-seven 

maintain beauty as well as to create it. 
There is nothing better than a brisk morn- 
ing walk to give brightness to the eyes and 
color to the cheeks. Let toilet preparations 
be used in any quantity, a clear, transparent 
skin is impossible without sufficient outdoor 
exercise to maintain a good circulation. If 
we desire beauty that instead of quickly 
fading away matures and takes on added 
richness and depth, we mu£t look to the 
outdoor girl to furnish it. She alone is in 
the possession of — 

"Health, and the joy that out of Nature springs, 
And Freedom's air-blown locks." 

Beauty of form, in many ways more im- 
portant than that of the features, is naturally 
dependent on well-rounded physical devel- 
opment. The lithe, willowy figure which 
some young women covet, is not to be 
attained by tight-lacing, a custom ruinous 
alike to beauty and to health, but is the 
result of an outdoor life combined with 
judicious physical culture. Moreover, vim, 



Pag* Thirty-eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

vivacity, and that indescribable esprit with- 
out which beauty itself is cold and unat- 
tractive, spring from a well-developed and 
naturally vigorous body. 

It is a mistake to suppose that outdoor 
exercise is unnecessary for a young woman 
whose daily work indoors, perchance in 
department Store or fadtory, involves phys- 
ical strain. When one stands behind a 
counter displaying goods or talking to 
customers till weary in mind and body, 
there is a vaSt difference between such 
exhaustion and the healthy tiring of the 
muscles through open-air exercise. The 
latter prepares for restful, refreshing sleep ; 
not so always the former. No amount of 
labor indoors, especially in buildings where 
the ventilation is not the beSt, will take the 
place of the morning constitutional or other 
regular outdoor exercise. On the other 
hand, activity in the open air will impart 
solidity and Strength to the muscles, and 
fit them to Stand the Strain indoors. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Thirty-nine 

While the young woman needs physical 
recreation in the open as much as the 
young man, she should be careful to avoid 
undue exertion. Such games as hockey, 
tennis, and basket-ball are useful in that 
they quickly disengage the mind from the 
accustomed work in school, office, or fac- 
tory; but there is always some danger in 
the mid^t of the excitement which compet- 
itive games inspire, of incurring overstrain. 
It is well to make it a rule, in playing 
games of any sort requiring physical exer- 
tion, to Stop short of exhaustion. 

For the majority of women, walking 
is the beSt and safest all-round exercise. 
Swimming is a fine second, being admir- 
able as a means of acquiring a good buSt 
development and a graceful carriage. Gar- 
den-making also is a delightful recreation, 
which may well occupy some spare hours 
during the spring and summer. 



CHAPTER FIVE 



More Fresh Air and Less Furniture 




HE outdoor spirit 
always tends to 
greater simplicity. 
Luxury, harmful 
luxury at that, is 
taking stronger 
hold upon every 
class of society. 
Covetousness is a 
canker in the lives of both poor and rich. 
Conventions of all sorts stifle individual 
convidtion and cut off simple-hearted joy- 
ousness. n Our expense," as Emerson says, 
n is almost all for conformity. It is for cake 
that we run in debt; 'tis not intellect, not 
the heart, not beauty, not worship, that 
coSts so much." 

Our houses are not seldom decidedly 
overfurnished. Pictures, vases, rugs, and 
upholstered furniture all have their proper 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Forty-one 

place; but a plethora of them not only- 
spoils the artistic effedt as a whole, but on 
hygienic grounds makes the home a very 
objectionable place to live in. DuSt and 
germs accumulate upon such things not- 
withstanding the beSt housekeeping, and 
become a menace to health. Some of these 
articles, again, are injured by bright sun- 
shine ; hence the blinds are drawn, and the 
room is kept in that dim-lighted and muSty 
condition which encourages the multiplica- 
tion of disease germs. 

There is another side to overfurnishing 
which is seldom thought of. Some rooms, 
in spite of fairly good ventilation, Still retain 
a fuSty odor due to the number of old 
things they contain. It is well to remember 
that upholstered furniture, carpets, rugs, 
beds, draperies, tapeStries, etc., are continu- 
ally undergoing a slow process of decay, in 
the course of which they take up oxygen 
and give off carbonic acid gas. In other 
words, they pollute the air juSt the same 



Page Forty-two OUT-OF-DOORS 

as we ourselves do in breathing, only to 
a much less extent. Moreover, as already 
indicated, they form convenient hiding- 
places for enormous colonies of germs, 
thus offering a serious menace to health. 
Hence an apartment should have as few 
articles of furniture as will consist with ac- 
tual needs, and those such as can easily 
be cleaned. The free open-air effedt which 
can be attained in this way is really mosl: 
satisfying to the artistic sense, as well as 
eminently restful and wholesome. 

The air of many working-class houses 
is polluted by smells emanating from the 
kitchen. Probably the average housewife 
does more frying than is £tridtly necessary. 
It certainly seems unfortunate on a warm 
July morning to fill the house with the 
sickening odor of burnt fat in order to 
have a meat breakfast, when a meal of 
poached eggs with bread and fruit would 
be equally nourishing, and much more 
pleasant to prepare. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Forty-three 

It is one of the greatest anomalies of 
modern life that after so much has been 
said by physicians and hygienics of the 
value of fresh air, the fad: remains that a 
great many people Still sleep for perhaps 
the greater part of the year with tightly 
closed bedroom windows. We call it 
sleep, but " Stupefaction" would almost be 
a better term. No wonder many of these 
victims of self-poisoning feel that they 
need an "eye-opener" or "pick-me-up" in 
the morning! 

Because we can not see the gases 
thrown off by the lungs, we are likely to 
think they are perfectly innocent. They 
are really in the highest degree noxious. 
All the blood of the body comes to the 
lungs to be cleansed, and the fresh air 
inhaled through the nose necessarily con- 
stitutes the cleansing agent. Once used, 
it may not be used over again without 
detriment. The air of an ordinary bed- 
room occupied by two persons would be 



Page Forty-four OUT-OF-DOORS 

rendered unfit for breathing in less than 
an hour, even assuming that some fresh 
air might creep in through the crevices; 
and this foul air grows more Stale and 
foul hour by hour. The cleansing of the 
blood thus has to be done with an im- 
pure agent, and can not be done thor- 
oughly; consequently the body is more 
or less poisoned. 

None of us would think of performing 
his morning ablutions in the same water 
for a whole week; and yet such a prac- 
tise would be far less harmful than this 
confirmed habit of thousands of otherwise 
sane persons in highly civilized America 
of breathing over and over again the foul, 
used-up air of the average bedroom. The 
lungs are really excretory organs, and daily 
throw off quantities of poisonous waSte 
matter. The duSt and perspiration that 
may accumulate on the face are as noth- 
ing compared with the deadly poisons 
given off in the breath. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Forty-five 

The question may be asked, n If bed- 
room atmosphere is so deadly, why do 
not more people die of it?" The answer 
is that thousands of deaths are recorded 
every year which are known to be due 
mainly to bad air. Consumption alone 
accounts for something like one eighth 
of all the deaths, and the chief cause of 
this disease is acknowledged to be foul 
air. The all-round physical deterioration 
which results from depriving the body of 
a proper supply of oxygen, shows itself 
in so many and varied forms that it is 
quite impossible adequately to trace the 
results of this wide-spread transgression 
of natural law. Said a well-known phy- 
sician, "Bedroom climate has slain its tens 
of thousands." 



CHAPTER SIX 



"Too Much House" 




HE baneful effecfts 
of house air are 
mo£t apparent in 
the case of sav- 
age tribes that 
have come under 
the influence of 
civilization. The 
American Indians 
afford a good example. A century or so 
ago, while they were living their wander- 
ing life, with scarce, uncertain supplies of 
food, and little shelter, but always plenty 
of fresh air, consumption was practically 
unknown among them, and they were a 
strong, virile race. To-day, with regular 
and abundant supplies of food, and shel- 
tered in houses provided by the United 
States Government, the noble red man 
is rapidly dying out. Among the Sioux 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Forty-seven 

Indians of the Missouri River, sixty per 
cent of the children are said to be tuber- 
cular, and half of those who reach the 
age of maturity die of the disease. 

Some of the Indians, after a short trial, 
refuse to live in houses. Certain members 
of one tribe, yielding to the persuasions 
of the Government agent, moved into a 
trim row of cottages he had provided ; but 
when he returned some months later he 
found them all back in their wigwams, the 
cottages being used as convenient storage 
places for food and grain. When the agent 
asked the meaning of this course of action, 
he was told that the people who went to 
live in the houses became ill and began 
to spit blood, but when they returned to 
their wigwams they soon recovered their 
usual health. n Too much house, n was 
the laconic diagnosis of one old Indian 
chief. His words would make an epitaph 
which might truthfully be inscribed over 
many graves in our crowded cemeteries. 



Page Forty-eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

But we are without doubt making some 
advancement toward a recognition of the 
value of fresh air. Medical men, after 
many years of more or less unfruitful 
laboratory research, have come to the 
unanimous conclusion that life in the 
open air offers the only hope of cure to 
consumptives. Probably we shall discover 
in time that this is also the be3t treatment 
for some other diseases; in fadt, sleeping 
in the open is now recommended by a 
number of physicians, especially in the 
case of sedentary persons who lack bodily 
tone and vigor. 

The writer knows a young man who 
had become somewhat run down by long 
hours and close application to business. 
His medical adviser simply told him to 
sleep out-of-doors. He accordingly had a 
porch built for the purpose, fitted with 
canvas screens so that he could shut off 
the driving rain and snow, and made it 
his sleeping place. Living as he did in 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Forty-nine 

one of the northern states, the tempera- 
ture occasionally dropped to fifteen or 
twenty degrees below zero; but he had 
a warm sleeping-bag and woolen cap, and 
slept better than ever before in his life. 
He soon began to feel new energy for 
work. His appetite and circulation im- 
proved, and the tired feeling disappeared. 
His habits in other respecfts being the 
same as before, he attributed his renewed 
health to the floods of fresh, pure air in 
which he nightly reveled. 

It is indeed something for a business 
man whose work keeps him indoors in 
a more or less depleted atmosphere all 
day, if he can sleep under the 3tars at 
night. We spend one third of our lives 
in bed. If for that portion of time we 
can come into vitalizing contact with the 
great out-of-doors, it can not fail to give 
us a definite impulse healthward. 

Open air sleeping is coming to be a 
fairly common thing. In a considerable 



Page Fifty OUT-OF-DOORS 

portion of the better class suburban homes 
now building, sleeping porches, at leaSt for 
summer use, are arranged for as a matter 
of course. And the movement is only well 
under way. The time is surely coming 
when the sleeping porch will be as general 
as the bath room. The common sense of 
humanity demands it. Why in all reason 
should one swelter in a bluffy room, which 
the midsummer sun, beating down upon it 
all the day, has raised to almost furnace 
heat, when ju£t outside the walls the air 
is cool and pleasant? Our bedrooms on 
hot nights are veritable torture chambers. 
Half the enervating eff edts of the American 
summer arise from sleeping in hot rooms, 
which only begin to cool off toward morn- 
ing, when we are about to leave them. But 
all this can be obviated by the simple ex- 
pedient of a sleeping porch; and those 
who once begin to use one, will find the 
experience so delightful that they will want 
to repeat it nightly the year round. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Fifty-one 

In New York the health officers are 
introducing into the tenement di^tridts 
sleeping porches (which, by the way, can 
easily and cheaply be built on to any 
house), and find that the consumptive 
patients sleeping out-of-doors in the heart 
of the city get well almost as quickly as 
those who are cared for in the country. 
While the air in our great cities is by 
no means so pure as that in the country, 
it is infinitely better than the air in the 
ordinary bedroom. 

Ex-consumptives who have been cured 
by open-air methods may be met any- 
where, only they can not exchange social 
visits with quite the same freedom as 
other people, because they find the at- 
mosphere in moS of their friends' houses 
dangerous to them. In some cases, where 
their needs are known, the hostess will 
hapten to open the windows as they are 
announced. Thus these ex-consumptives 
are adting as fresh-air missionaries; and 



Fifty, two OUT-OF-DOORS 

we could do with a great many more of 
them. 

Bad air, it may be said before leaving 
the subjedt, is by no means confined to 
the homes of the people. The atmosphere 
in some of our churches is fairly sepul- 
chral; railway carriages are often unutter- 
ably stuffy; and we are sorry to say that 
the air in some of our recently built public 
libraries, especially on crowded Saturday 
nights, is often stagnant and offensive be- 
yond description. It goes without saying 
that the air of saloons is bad because of 
the presence of crowds of people and no 
proper means of ventilating. Few public 
halls have a really efficient system of ven- 
tilation; and the same is true of factories, 
stores, and workshops. 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

The Higher Ministry of 
Field and Wood 




UTDOOR living, 
moreover, has a 
bearing on the 
life of the spirit. 
Not only do sed- 
entary habits tend 
to physical decay; 
they often cause 
also a benumbing 
of the finer sensibilities. The faculty of 
nature-appreciation, being unexercised, is 
presently lo^t; the person is dwarfed 
mentally and physically. Thus many go 
through life blind to the marvelous 
beauties of nature with which this world 
abounds. They "see not the bright light 
which is in the clouds;" they hear not the 
murmur of the wind among the trees, or 



Page Fifty-four OUT-OF-DOORS 

the soft patter of rain on the roof. Their 
hearts are "waxed gross, and their ears are 
dull of hearing, and their eyes they have 
closed," "that they can not see." They are 
depriving themselves daily of some of the 
chief joys of living. God has scattered 
beauty with a lavish hand, and in the 
country there is ever something to call out 
wonder and admiration. Even in our great 
cities there are opportunities to satisfy the 
love of natural beauty. The parks, large 
and small, contain flower beds and trees 
and shrubbery, and overhead is an ever- 
changing sky. A quiet morning walk in 
one of these public breathing places is a 
fine preparation for the wearing work of 
the day. If the heart is susceptible to 
natural beauty, even the tiniest open 
square may give — 

"A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm 
That nature breathes among the hills and groves." 

Those who are compelled to live in a 
wilderness of brick and mortar, need es- 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Fifty-five 

pecially to train their senses to note the 
less striking beauties of nature. Every one 
can admire a particularly gorgeous sunset; 
but the delicate shades of pink and blue 
and gray and amber that may be seen in 
the we£t almost any evening go without 
notice. So also a bright blue sky, bare or 
flecked with fleecy white clouds, is gener- 
ally admired ; but the 3teel grays and soft 
purples and other quiet tints of an ordi- 
nary day are unobserved. 

To the eyes open to see it, there is a 
va£t deal of simple loveliness in the world. 
The great Creator has made everything 
perfed: in its kind; and though sin has 
marred His faultless handiwork, and one 
sees much now to cause pain and sorrow, 
yet there is no lack in nature of things to 
love and admire. 

"Still on the seeds of all He made, 
The rose of beauty burns." 

Nature does not wholly turn away from 
our va£t smoky cities. If we are obliged 



Page Fifty- six OUT-OF-DOORS 

to pass our lives in some gloomy tenement 
di^tridt, even there the dewdrops glisten 
like diamonds in the morning sunshine, 
the rosy fingered dawn is ours to behold, 
and the ever changing panorama of the 
clouds; the sun ca£ts his evening splendor 
alike over palace and hovel, and the £tars 
look down on us by night with a sweet 
benedidtion. 

In order to get the be£t that nature has 
to give us, we need to cultivate a broad 
catholicity of ta^te. It is not good, for 
instance, to be too exacting of the weather. 
The day muS be of an especially inviting 
kind if some dainty people are to venture 
forth. But to a healthy person, with mind 
and body rightly attuned to nature's har- 
monies, it is a joy to be out-of-doors in 
any and all weathers. 

Every season of the year offers its own 
peculiar delights to the nature lover. The 
crisp, cold air of "winter, bare and hoary," 
he finds to be a delicious tonic; and the 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Fifty-seven 

comparative nakedness of field and wood 
enables him to Study some features of the 
landscape which are more or less hidden 
at other times of the year. With the open- 
ing of spring, he greets the flowers and 
birds as they appear, and watches nature's 
multitudinous, almost feverish activity. 
The deep, shady woods, the new-mown 
hay and ripening corn of summer, give joy 
to every one; and when this entrancing 
period is followed by the "season of miSts 
and mellow f ruitf ulness, n and — 

"Autumn bold, 
With universal tinge of sober gold," 

comes on the scene, the interest is only 
intensified, the harveSt-time of the year 
having a power and pathos that make it 
second to none. Thus nature continues 
to charm and inStrud: all her attentive 
children. 

It is not necessary to travel widely in 
order to see moSt interesting things. We 
may Stay where we are; but we muSt get 



Page Fifty-eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

our eyes opened. "The whole army of the 
woods and hedges marches across a single 
farm in twelve months," writes Jefferies. 
"A single tree — especially an old tree — 
is visited by four fifths of the birds that 
ever perch in the course of that period." 
" But, " adds the same author, " you should 
know the places in winter as well as in 
tempting summer, when song and shade 
and color attract every one to the field. 
You should face the mire and slippery 
path. Nature yields nothing to the syba- 
rite. The meadow glows with buttercups 
in spring, the hedges are green, the woods 
lovely; but these are not to be enjoyed in 
their full significance unless you have trav- 
ersed the same places when bare, and have 
watched the slow fulfilment of the flowers. " 
Ruskin, writing of nature in much the 
same strain, says : " Her finest touches are 
things which muSt be watched for; her 
mo£t perfedt passages of beauty are the 
moSt evanescent. She is constantly doing 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Fifty-nine 

something beautiful for us, but it is some- 
thing which she has not done before and 
will not do again — some exhibition of her 
general powers in particular circumstances, 
which if we do not catch at the instant it 
is passing, will not be repeated for us." 
There is indeed a whole world of exqui- 
site enjoyment to be had in a living, vital 
contadt with nature. She has something 
suited to every one's needs; none need 
turn away empty-handed. 

"The air salubrious of her lofty hills, 
The cheering fragrance of her dewy vales, 
And music of the woods — no works of man 
May rival these; these all bespeak a power 
Peculiar and exclusively her own. 
Beneath the open sky she spreads the feast; 
*Tis free to all — 'tis every day renewed." 

The magnificence of the works of nature 
would be overwhelming were we not so 
accustomed to them, Take the Slars alone. 
"One might think," writes Emerson, "the 
atmosphere was made transparent with 
this design, to give man, in the heavenly 



Page Sixty OUT-OF-DOORS 

bodies, the perpetual presence of the 
sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how 
great they are ! If the 3tars should appear 
one night in a thousand years, how would 
men believe and adore ; and preserve, for 
many generations, the remembrance of the 
City of God which had been shown!" 

Nature does more, however, than minis- 
ter to our sense of the beautiful and the 
sublime. She can teach us spiritual lessons 
as well. Rightly approached, she leads 
onward to God. 

Said Emerson : " The aspecft of Nature 
is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she 
stands with bended head, and hands 
folded upon her breast." The beauty of 
nature he regarded as not ultimate, but as 
the n herald of inward and eternal beauty. n 

"God writes the Gospel," said Luther, 
"not in the Bible alone, but on trees and 
flowers and clouds and £tars." Words- 
worth believed in nature as a teacher of 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Sixty-one 

spiritual truth. This facft he indicates in 
the familiar stanza: — 

"One impulse from a vernal wood 

May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can." 

And again : — 

" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy; for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings." 

Surely the be£t thoughts come to us 
under the open heavens. When we look 
up to the clear-shining 3lars, are not our 
hearts gently yet mo£t mightily drawn out 
toward purity and holiness? Does it not 
tend to make us humble and lowly? — yea, 
lead us to exclaim with David, "When I 



Sixty- two OUT-OF-DOORS 

consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy 
fingers, the moon and the 3tars, which 
Thou ha^t ordained; what is man, that 
Thou art mindful of him? and the son of 
man, that Thou visite^t him?" And can 
we consider the lilies of the field without 
being drawn closer to the God who clothes 
them in those robes of purest white, and 
who has promised also to clothe man, who 
was created in His image? 

What Stevenson said of a cathedral is 
eminently true of nature — it sets a man 
to preaching to himself. Alone in the 
woods many a troubled soul has heard 
and responded to the call to a higher, 
holier life. Communion with nature con- 
tributes to that poise, that sense of reserve 
power, which is so necessary to great 
adtion ; it helps one to turn aside from 
trivialities and concentrate on essentials. 
It kindles noble aspirations, and imparts 
that robust vigor of mind and body so 
necessary to translate them into adtion. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Sixty-three 

Also to the wounded, grief-Stricken soul 
there comes a measure of relief in the 
healing calm of nature. Sorrows lose their 
Sting in the open air, and thus become 
more bearable. n The sweet and solemn 
influence which comes to you out of the 
noontide or the midnight sky, 11 wrote 
Phillips Brooks, "does not take away your 
pain, but it takes out of it its bitterness. 
It lifts it to a higher peace. It says, ' Be 
Still and wait ! ! It gives the reason power 
and leave and time to work. It gathers the 
partial into the embrace of the universal. 
It fills the little with the large. Without 
mockery or scorn, it reminds the small 
that it is small. The atom floating on 
the surface hears deep calling unto deep 
below, and forgets its own restlessness and 
homelessness in listening." 

Jefferies writes eloquently of the large- 
ness, freedom, and joy one finds under the 
open heavens. "Step aside," he bids, "from 
the trodden footpath of personal experience, 



Page Sixty-four OUT-OF-DOORS 



throwing away the petty cynicism born of 
petty hopes disappointed. Step out upon 
the broad down beside the green corn, and 
let its freshness become part of life. The 
wind passes, and it bends — let the wind, 
too, pass over the spirit. From the cloud- 
shadow it emerges into the sunshine — let 
the heart come out from the shadow of 
roofs to the open glow of the sky. High 
above, the songs of the larks fall as rain — 
receive it with open hands. Pure is the 
color of the green flags, the slender pointed 
blades — let the thought be pure as the 
light that shines through that color. Broad 
are the downs and open the aspecft — gather 
the breadth and largeness of view. Never 
can that view be wide enough and large 
enough, there will always be room to aim 
higher. As the air of the hills enriches the 
blood, so let the presence of these beautiful 
things enrich the inner sense. One memory 
of the green corn, fresh beneath the sun and 
wind, will lift up the heart from the clods. n 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Sixty-five 

This wholesome spiritual uplift which 
comes from the fields and the woods is 
especially needed in an age like the pres- 
ent, when commercial greed threatens to 
sap the very foundations of society, and 
the lives of the many alternate between 
the grinding, monotonous toil necessary to 
eke out a living, interrupted now and then 
by exciting amusements which are hardly 
less wearing upon the bodily energies than 
the work itself. The modern young man 
lives altogether too fa£t a life. He doesn't 
have time to get acquainted with himself. 
If he has a spare moment, he whips out a 
novel from his pocket, or he eagerly scans 
the close-printed columns of a daily news- 
paper. The rage for news is a veritable 
disease. "Hardly a man takes a half-hour's 
sleep after dinner, but when he wakes he 
holds up his head and asks, 'What's the 
news ? f as if the regt of mankind had £tood 
his sentinels."* 

* Thoreau. 



Page Sixty-six OUT-OF-DOORS 

It is well now and then to follow the 
example of a certain patriarch, of whom 
we read, "And Isaac went out to meditate 
in the field at the eventide;" or the divine 
counsel, "Be Still, and know that I am 
God." We often gain time by stopping 
to think. The genial author of "The Sim- 
ple Life" wisely says: — 

"He who knows not how to halt, knows 
not how to march, or to profit by his 
marches. He muS sometimes sit down, 
look behind and before him, recall and 
foresee, consider his strength and his time, 
and listen to that which the blades of 
grass, the ants, the birds, say to the trav- 
eler as he pauses for an instant. He mu^t 
sit down to perceive, through the sounds 
and forms of things which pass, the voice 
of God and the whisper of the soul." 

It is no loss of time to pause now and 
then amidst life's busy activities in order 
to commune with nature. The distin- 
guished exponent of the Strenuous life is 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Sixty-seven 

a man of confirmed outdoor habits. When 
Ex-President Roosevelt wishes to be alone, 
we are told, he "dons a flannel shirt, shoul- 
ders an ax, and betakes himself to some 
secluded spot where there are trees to 
fell." Gladstone also loved to make chips 
fly. In general, the more arduous the daily- 
toil, the greater the need of these seasons 
of withdrawal to be alone with nature, and 
drink in fresh vitality at every pore. 



CHAPTER EIGHT 



Around the Camp-Fire 




SUMMER spent 
under canvas is 
perhaps the near- 
est approach to an 
absolutely ideal 
vacation that can 
be imagined. To 
camp by a running 
stream is indeed 
the experience of a lifetime. It brings one 
into sympathetic touch with nature as al- 
mo^l no other form of recreation. It gives 
freshness of soul, a renewing of all the 
powers of mind and body. Verily there 
is nothing like it to make one young again. 
What a delightful pidture Stevenson has 
given us : — 

"The bed was made, the room was fit, 
By punctual eve the stars were lit, 
The air was still, the water ran; 
No need there was for maid or man, 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Sixty-nine 

When we put up, my ass and I, 
At God's green caravanserai." 

Camping is in itself a whole education 
in the fundamentals of right living. No 
better means could be found of showing 
how few and simple are the adtual needs 
of mankind. It has been suggested that 
a law should be passed requiring every 
young man to spend two summers in a 
tent as part of his life training before 
reaching the age of twenty. The idea is 
eminently suggestive. Let us, even at the 
risk of seeming to digress, enlarge upon it 
a little. Is there not the beSt of reason for 
our legislative bodies to do something to 
offset the unfortunate industrial conditions 
which make for the destruction of hardi- 
ness and Stamina in our young men? 
What could possibly be a more beautiful 
spedtacle to the true patriot than to see 
year by year thousands of young men 
who had arrived we will suppose at the 
age of seventeen, gathering together in 



Page Seventy OUT-OF-DOORS 

camps for vigorous training in the open 
air, and to listen to practical health lecftures 
by some of our foremost physicians ? How 
it should gladden the hearts of these men 
who spend so large a part of their energies 
in more or less fruitless endeavors to reno- 
vate broken-down, diseased bodies, to meet 
face to face the flower of the country's 
youth, to hold up before them wholesome, 
manly ideals, to warn them against vice 
and all enervating habits, not mincing 
matters, but calling a spade a spade, and 
plainly showing the baleful harvest which 
follows the sowing of wild oats. 

Such holiday camps should include 
opportunities for engaging in all manner 
of wholesome sports, as well as physical 
culture drills calculated to correct any tend- 
encies to flat cheats and round shoulders. 
Moreover there could be plenty of march- 
ing and countermarching. The young men 
would be under discipline, and would learn 
how to move in bodies large and small 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Seventy-one 

with military precision. Their endurance 
should be tested by forced marches. They 
could learn to handle the spade and the 
pickax, and to perform all the duties nec- 
essary to defense of one's country except 
adtual shooting. Health, hardiness, and 
all-round physique should be the things 
chiefly aimed at in these camps. These 
may properly be required, because they 
are essential to good citizenship. Shooting 
ability is doubtless necessary in adtual war; 
but if the country's youth are strong and 
hardy, with reasonably good all-round de- 
velopment, it will not take them long to 
learn the use of the rifle when their serv- 
ices are required in the fighting line. 

Of course the training need not be con- 
fined to two or three weeks' camp life in 
the summer. It would naturally be fol- 
lowed up by a home program consisting 
of gymnasium practise, walking and run- 
ning, and all healthy outdoor sports, as 
well as a wholesome observance of physio- 



Page Seventy. two OUT-OF-DOORS 

logical laws in such matters as food, drink, 
and ventilation. 

The value of such training would be 
far-reaching. Not only would the country 
enjoy an added sense of security from the 
knowledge that its able-bodied young men 
were keeping themselves in a fit condition 
physically, so that in time of threatened 
invasion they could, on very short notice, 
take their places in the fighting ranks ; but 
in all the various walks of life better work 
would be done as a result of the more 
general prevalence of robust health and 
vigor. 

If people only camped out occasionally, 
they could hardly help discovering that 
night air is not such a dreadful thing after 
all, and an open window need not give 
one his death of cold. They could learn 
some of the advantages of the simpler life. 

To the veteran outdoor man, whose bed- 
room is lighted by the 3tars, the close air 
and so-called comforts of a modern house 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Seventy- three 

are anything but desirable. An old Gipsy- 
was once asked if he did not think he 
would like to spend his remaining years in 
a house. He replied that as he was get- 
ting pretty old, and his che£t was none too 
strong, he could not undertake such a risky 
experiment. "A young Gipsy," he thought, 
n might manage it, perhaps, and seem none 
the worse for it ; but not a man of eighty- 
four. n * Would that more of our old men 
shared with this child of nature his appre- 
hensions of the dangers of confinement in 
a house! 

Camping is unsurpassed as a pleasurable 
outing for the family. It has that flavor of 
romance which captivates boys. It gives 
them the ta^le of wholesome primitive life 
which their strong, sturdy natures crave. 

The American correspondent of one of 
the London dailies recently reported a 
night picnic which Ex-President Roosevelt 

*"The Tramp's Handbook," by Harry Roberts. 



Page Seventy-four OUT-OF-DOORS 

enjoyed with his sons and three of their 
friends : — 

"As soon as a log fire was burning 
brightly, the evening meal was cooked and 
yarns were spun, the President telling 
an enraptured circle of boys a series of 
thrilling hunting stories. The weather 
was delightful, a silvery moon remaining 
in the wdt till the log fire burned low, 
when, wrapping themselves in blankets, 
the campers composed themselves to 
slumber. . . 

"At sunrise next morning the fire was 
relit and breakfast cooked. The camp was 
then broken up, and the party returned at 
an early hour to Sagamore." 

Perchance some men may think it a 
little undignified to sit round a campfire 
with the boys. We reply that it is a cheap 
kind of dignity that depends upon the 
frock coat and the silk hat. Moreover, the 
be£t men keep fresh and young in heart by 
unbending themselves on occasion. "A 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Seventy-five 

full-grown man!" exclaims the author of 
the delightful "Outdoor Papers." "There 
is not a person in the world who can afford 
to be a full-grown man through all the 
twenty-four hours. There is not one who 
does not need, more than he needs his 
dinner, to have habitually one hour in the 
day when he throws himself with boyish 
eagerness into interests as simple as those 
of boys." 

If more fathers of to-day made chums of 
their boys and joined them in an occasional 
outing of this kind, it would go a long way 
toward solving the boy problem. Even the 
modern boy is by in^tind: something of a 
savage, and many of his troubles arise from 
the difficulty he finds in adjusting himself 
to an unwholesome and artificial environ- 
ment. The boy is always nearer to the 
heart of nature than the grown-up man; 
he has a passionate love of the open air 
and of the fields and woods ; he is never 
really happy indoors. Nature has planted 



Page Seventy-six OUT-OF-DOORS 

this outdoor in£tin<ft in the boy's heart for 
the good of the race; and when we try 
to Stamp it out and make our boys fine 
drawing-room creatures, we strike a blow 
at the national health. 

Of course the boy needs training, but 
not the kind of training which seeks to 
crush his God-given inStindts. He muSt 
learn to respedt the laws of society; but if 
he is given to understand that these laws 
of man go diredtly contrary to the divine 
laws in the form of inStindts which nature 
has planted within his breast, what wonder 
that he rebels! 

We are wont to deplore the increase of 
cigarette-smoking and other bad habits 
among the boys, but the remedy lies near 
to hand. If fathers would make comrades 
of their sons, give their Sturdy natures free 
vent in natural channels, and then at the 
proper time take pains to explain to them 
why smoking is bad for a growing lad, they 
would in moSt cases be rewarded with 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Seventy-seven 

cheerful obedience. The boy has a loyal 
soul, and when he feels that he is under- 
Stood, places implicit confidence in " father. n 
But he also has a keen sense of justice, and 
very naturally displays a spirit of open re- 
bellion when confronted with prohibitions 
on every side. 

To return to our subjedt, camping has 
proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable mode 
of spending the holidays. The cycle 
camper will carry on his wheel a tent, 
ground sheet, and sleeping-bag, and all 
other necessaries of camp life which mod- 
ern inventive genius has supplied in such 
light and portable form. He is free to pitch 
wherever he pleases, on the breezy cliff 
overlooking the sea, or by some flowing 
Stream, or, with the kind permission of the 
farmer, perchance in an orchard all in 
blossom. One day he is in this county, 
to-morrow fifty miles away ; and he knows 
nothing of the Stuffy rooms and unwhole- 
some beds of public inns. No wonder he 

6 



Page Seventy-eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

derives from this intercourse with nature 
a benefit that others seek in vain in the 
conventional holiday resorts. 

Family camping is hardly less interesting. 
The children take naturally to camp life. 
The open-air inStindt is Strong in infancy. 
Fretful babies become quiet and contented 
when allowed to be out-of-doors. Delicate 
little girls become Strong; pale, sunken 
cheeks fill out and take on a rosy hue, and 
weak, flabby muscles become firm. The 
open air is nature's panacea for the delicate 
child. Careworn mothers, with over- 
wrought nerves, get hardly less pleasure 
from such a holiday than the little ones; 
while the business or professional man 
finds it much easier to caSt off wearing 
perplexities in the delightfully free and 
unconventional atmosphere of a camp 
than in the beSt of seaside lodgings. 

It has been truly remarked that the man 
who built the firSt house has much to an- 
swer for. Certainly living in houses has 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Seventy-nine 

not tended to simplicity and free-handed 
hospitality. When men took to building 
houses that they could bolt and bar, they 
at once began filling them with things that 
they did not really need, and luxury grew 
apace. The modern man is fairly smoth- 
ered with his so-called comforts ; his life is 
largely spent in getting things he can never 
truly use, and guarding them from his fel- 
lows. Camp life exemplifies the dodtrine 
of simplicity and of dignified leisure; it 
gives one time to think a little. The 
camper need take no account of the hours. 
He says with Thoreau : — 

"It shall be what o'clock I say it is." 

Away from the bustle and turmoil of life, 
he breathes nature's healing calm. Day 
and night teach him their lessons. He 
absorbs health, freshness, and strength at 
every pore, and is made over again men- 
tally and physically. 

"Caravanning," another excellent form of 
outdoor recreation, has so much in common 



Page Eighty OUT-OF-DOORS 

with camping, that it needs but few words 
here. The caravan should be strong and 
durable, elegant in its simplicity. Any 
trace of luxury in appointments or over- 
elaborateness in 3truc5ture is fatal to the 
be£t artistic effedt of an open-air vehicle 
of this kind, and out of harmony with the 
spirit of the outdoor life. It also detracts 
from the simple-hearted enjoyment of the 
users. If we are to carry all our conve- 
niences with us, we might as well 3tay at 
home. There is little satisfaction in holi- 
day-making unless, in some degree at lea^t, 
we have learned how to "rough it." 

In the absence of a regular caravan, a 
covered wagon will serve every necessary 
purpose; and where the progress is lei- 
surely, several days or even a week being 
spent in pleasant spots along the road, it 
will be the cheapest plan, when the time 
comes to move on, to hire a horse to pull 
the wagon to the next stopping place. The 
free, unconventional life in the open air 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Eighty-one 

and in the moS pleasing surroundings, 
which is possible while taking this kind of 
vacation, is far more restful and pleasing 
than the artificial life at a seaside resort, 
and will send one back to work refreshed 
in mind and body, and with a keener 
feeling for the beautiful things in nature 
of which our country has so large a share. 



CHAPTER NINE 



'The Long Brown Path 1 




F caravanning and 
camping are good, 
what shall we say 
of that finest of all 
outings, the walk- 
ing tour? It is the 
oldest, mo£t gen- 
erally approved 
form of taking a 
journey, and yet it never grows £tale. It is 
very common among the students of Ger- 
man universities, who with knapsack on 
back climb the mountains and explore the 
woods and valleys, not only of their native 
country, but of the more remote parts of 
Europe as well. We could wish that this 
Wanderlust might seize upon the young 
men of America. What with trolley-cars 
and bicycles and automobiles, walking bids 
fair to become one of the lo£t arts. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Eighty-three 

Americans are notoriously afraid of using 
their leg muscles. We never walk when 
we can ride. This is probably one reason 
for our numerous nervous breakdowns. 
Our English cousins vastly outstrip us as 
pedestrians. Rare old Ben Jonson, in "the 
spacious times of great Elizabeth," footed 
it from London to Scotland. Wordsworth 
composed some of his be£t poetry while 
climbing the hills of his beloved Cum- 
berland; Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson 
were all fond of "the long brown path." 
Dickens thought nothing of a twenty-mile 
walk before breakfast. Hazlitt has written 
such a delightful essay on walking, that 
we mu£t quote a few lines. "Give me," 
he writes, "the clear blue sky over my 
head, and the green turf beneath my feet, 
a winding road before me, and a three 
hours' march to dinner — and then to 
thinking! It is hard if I can not Start 
some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, 
I run, I leap, I sing for joy." 



Page Eighty-four OUT-OF-DOORS 

But walking is not exciting enough for 
the pampered young people of to-day. 
The good walker muS be simple-hearted, 
cheerful, joyous; he mu£t, as Burroughs 
has said, be capable of amusement on a 
low key. His senses should be sufficiently 
alert to read the messages which nature 
is sending him from every field and bush. 
He mu£t take a hearty delight in all living 
things. 

Walking is probably the be£t all-round 
cure for the ills of civilization. If the jaded 
society people were to take resolutely to 
pede^trianism, they might find life once 
more worth the living. "Think," writes 
Burroughs, "how the atones would preach 
to them by the wayside; how their be- 
numbed minds would warm up beneath 
the fridtion of the gravel; how their vain 
and foolish thoughts, their desponding 
thoughts, their besetting demons of one 
kind or another, would drop behind them, 
unable to keep up or to endure the fresh 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Eighty-five 

air. They would walk away from their 
ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharita- 
bleness, their pride of dress; for these 
devils always want to ride, while the 
simple virtues are never so happy as 
when on foot." 

The walking habit would probably do 
more than any other one thing to dispel 
the moral liStlessness, the feeling that life 
is hardly worth while, the sense of disil- 
lusionment almoSl approaching cynicism, 
which has crept into modern society, and 
threatens to undermine the usefulness of 
many of our young men. Somehow the 
fresh air and the sunshine and the twin- 
kling Stars insist on telling us that life is 
worth the living, and that we may hope 
for something Still better beyond the grave. 

Entirely apart from its bracing moral 
effedt, walking is regarded by physicians 
as one of the very beSt kinds of exercise; 
it improves appetite and digestion, Stimu- 
lates a sluggish liver, Strengthens a weak 



Page Eighty-six OUT-OF-DOORS 

heart, renders the muscles supple and the 
skin adtive, and imparts tone and vigor 
to the nervous system. "Get a pedometer 
and walk," was the brief but effective 
prescription given a worthy statesman 
whose weight had insisted on climbing 
steadily up the scale while his Strength 
as rapidly went down. 

As a wholesome, economical, and thor- 
oughly interesting mode of spending one's 
holidays, we know of nothing to equal 
the walking tour. Given good shoes, a 
Strong, easy-fitting suit of clothes, and a 
knapsack with a few essentials, what more 
could a healthy young man ask? Has 
he not taken out his emancipation papers? 
Is not the world at his feet? 

In Whitman's inimitable words : — 

"Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, 
Healthy, free, the world before me, 

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 
Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune; 
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need 

nothing. 
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, 
Strong and content I travel the open road " 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Eighty-seven 

Coming back from such a vacation spent 
on the open road, the young man will have 
more than a ruddy complexion, good diges- 
tion, and well-hardened leg muscles to 
show. His inner life will have been en- 
riched. The memory of deep, mysterious 
woods and sunlit valleys will linger about 
him; a sweet aroma of nature, like the 
fragrance of flowers, will continue to envel- 
ope him, even in the smoky city. From his 
communion with the great out-of-doors, he 
has gathered sanity and health to take him 
over some dreary Stretches of monotonous 
drudgery in shop or fadtory. He has caught 
glimpses of a better world, and no longer 
toils hopelessly. Henceforth he only sojourns 
in the city ; he lives in the country, because, 
though miles of duSty pavements intervene, 
his heart is with the fields and the woods. 

For those unable to command sufficient 
leisure to take a walking tour, there is the 
countryside ramble, which affords at the 
same time wholesome exercise for the body 



Page Eighty- eight OUT-OF-DOORS 

and an opportunity to observe the habits 
of plants and birds. It is a sad commentary 
on our educational system that hardly one 
person in ten can distinguish the songs of 
the moSt common birds, or recognize them 
at sight. We are as Strangers in our own 
country, because our Studies have been 
so largely confined to books, and we have 
not cultivated the faculty of observation. 
Walking lends itself admirably to nature 
Study, and loses none of its value as exer- 
cise when connected with the pursuit of 
some hobby, such as botany, zoology, or 
photography. 

Some young men are so situated that 
they muSt spend the whole day in con- 
fining work indoors. Such will find a walk 
by Starlight thoroughly enjoyable. During 
the gloomy winter weather the evening 
walk will be almoSt as pleasant as one 
taken in the middle of the day. The noisy 
Street traffic has largely subsided, but many 
of the shops are brilliantly lighted up, and 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Eighty-nine 

the general effedt is bright and pleasant. 
A brisk walk of three or four miles will 
clear the brain of idle worries, quicken 
the circulation, and prepare for a good 
night's re£t. 



CHAPTER TEN 



Back to Nature and the Soil 




HO does not take 
delight in a gar- 
den? There is 
something about 
growing flowers 
and plants that 
exerts a kind of 
fascination over 
the human mind. 
Day after day we see new beauties unfold ; 
the glories of creation are reenadted before 
our wondering eyes. And what subtile 
healing power seems to spring from the 
soil! What freshness of mind and vigor 
of body ! Verily many an invalid has 
sought health in vain till he was willing 
to dig for it. 

Said Emerson, n When I go into my 
garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel 
such an exhilaration and health, that I 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Ninety-one 

discover that I have been defrauding my- 
self all this time in letting others do for me 
what I should have done with my own 
hands." 

There is indeed a solid satisfaction in 
making one's own garden, even to the 
inclusion of the heavier work, which is so 
often relegated to hired help. Somehow 
useful work in connection with the soil 
seems to give more lasting pleasure than 
that afforded by athletics. Man has nat- 
ural affinities with the soil; he was meant 
to be a gardener. 

Tolstoy, even at his advanced age, does 
some work daily on his farm. He keeps 
in trim for his arduous literary labors by 
exercising his muscles in the open air. If 
brain workers generally adopted this plan, 
they would not suffer so much from mind 
weariness, and there would be fewer break- 
downs from what is called overwork, which 
nearly always means underwork so far as 
the muscles are concerned. 



Page Ninety- two OUT-OF-DOORS 

Farming and gardening are especially 
good for us because they afford wholesome 
exposure to the elements. They toughen 
the skin, harden the muscles, and give a 
much-needed physical stamina. The tend- 
ency of city life is to pamper the body, and 
render it soft and delicate. It is a far cry 
to the sturdy Highland chief who, camping 
one night with his men, went and kicked 
from under his son's head the snow which 
the youth had formed into a sort of pillow, 
angrily declaring that "the young rascal, 
by his degenerate effeminacy, would bring 
disgrace on the clan." But it was the 
rough, strong men of this type who laid 
the foundations of America's greatness; 
and the future welfare of the country will 
depend on whether it can continue to rear 
hardy sons and daughters. The culture 
which is not virile is a failure. The nation 
that shuns physical toil, will sooner or later 
give way to its betters. Ancient Rome lo£t 
its empire when it lo£t its imperial race. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Ninety-three 

The exodus to the cities is a symptom 
that can not but cause alarm. It has been 
well said that the modern city is the despair 
of the political economist. Its labor market 
is an exceedingly uncertain one. With its 
prison-like factories, its gloomy, comfortless 
tenements and noisome slums, it seems an 
infernal contrivance for weakening and 
destroying the race. 

But while labor conditions are bad, they 
are not hopeless ; and we mu£t look to the 
young men now growing up, to better them. 
They will need to begin by taking them- 
selves in hand. Wholesome outdoor habits 
lie at the root of success in life. It should 
be the ambition of every young man and 
young woman to attain the highest possible 
degree of physical efficiency. 

"Young man, go weSt," was the sage 
advice given to the ambitious youth of a 
former generation. We should like to say 
to the sedentary race now growing up: 
Young man, young woman, get out-of- 

7 

/ 



Page Ninety-four OUT-OF-DOORS 

doors. Get back to nature. Cultivate the 
closest possible acquaintance with the soil. 
Shun enervating habits and every kind of 
dissipation. Don't waSte your eyesight on 
cheap novels. Read wholesome outdoor 
books by such men as Jefferies, Burroughs, 
Thoreau, Higginson, Roosevelt, and others, 
and get acquainted with the beautiful world 
in which you live, and the manifold activ- 
ities of plant and animal life. Eat only 
wholesome food ; keep regular hours ; value 
the sweet weariness which follows useful 
toil. Play as many games as you can; 
leave other men to do the looking on. 

Better Still, get the play spirit into your 
daily work; put zeSt and interest and 
whole-hearted enjoyment into every task 
you undertake. Said a prominent physi- 
cian whose friends remonstrated against his 
long hours of professional toil, "My work 
is nine tenths play ; hence it does not wear 
on me, in fad: I enjoy every hour of it." 

"Give us, oh, give us the man," said 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Ninety-five 

Carlyle, "who sings at his work. . . . The 
very Stars are said to make harmony as 
they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous 
is the Strength of cheerfulness, altogether 
paSt calculation its powers of endurance. 
Efforts to be permanently useful muSt be 
uniformly joyous — a spirit all sunshine — 
graceful from very gladness — beautiful 
because bright." 

Walking is better than physic ; so do not 
be sparing of shoe-leather. If your health 
is indifferent and you have been dosing 
yourself with patent medicines, you muSt 
Stop all that. Get weaned from the bottle. 
Seek your health in the open air. Shun 
valetudinarianism as you would the plague; 
on no account coddle yourself, but endeavor 
by wise adherence to physical laws to 
become healthier and hardier every day. 

Remember that nature is yours to enjoy; 
the woods and fields and glorious morning 
air are your ancient heritage. For you the 
grass grows and the trees put forth buds 



Page Ninety-six OUT-OF-DOORS 

and blossoms ; for you the birds tune their 
cheerful lays and the cattle browse in the 
meadows, while the sun shines warm over- 
head. Your work hours may have to be 
spent in the spirit-deadening surroundings 
of shop or factory; but your leisure hours 
should find you out under the open heav- 
ens in city park if not in the country, taking 
long, deep breaths of life-giving oxygen, and 
enjoying the sights and scenes of nature. 
Your longer holidays should see you, not 
lolling in an easy chair at some conventional 
boarding-house or seaside resort, but out in 
the open air, perchance footing it over hill 
and dale with knapsack on back, or boating 
on river or lake, or camping by the running 
brook, or helping some farmer to gather in 
the golden grain — doing something that 
will harden the muscles, increase the breath- 
ing capacity, refresh the mind, deepen the 
insight into the beauty and meaning of 
natural laws, and thus diredtly or indirectly 
fit you for larger usefulness. 



OUT-OF-DOORS Page Ninety-seven 

As you thus cultivate a healthy outdoor 
spirit, and seek to encourage it in others, 
you will be doing something to 3tem the 
tide of physical deterioration, and to build 
up a nation pure, strong, and virile, lov- 
ing freedom, powerful in defense of the 
right, and beautiful in its manhood and 
womanhood. 



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Cloth, 222 pages, price $1.00. 

Vegetarian By Mr. E. G. Fulton, manager of the Los An- 
Cook Book g e l e s Cafeterias. Embodied in this book are 
the results of the author's long experience and 
observation in the combination of foods and their healthful 
and palatable preparation. Cloth, price $1.00. 

Elo the Eagle Contains stories of ten animals, — life 

and Other Stories histories of the author's boyhood friends. 
Very interesting. Price $1.00. 



Pacific Press Publishing Association 

Mountain View, California 
Portland, Ore. Calgary, Alberta Kansas City, Mo. 



1 1910 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



m 20 m$ 



